Consciousness. We take it for granted. So focused on what we are conscious of, we don’t realize that we are conscious of it. And yet, it is what we give our consciousness to that we give our very self to. Kabbalah gives us a key to the wise direction of our consciousness.

Most states of human consciousness are absorbed in thought. So absorbed in thought is human consciousness that most human beings don’t realize that they are living in a thought when that is indeed what they are doing. Leaving thought to work directly on one’s state of consciousness represents a major stage in the process of awakening. When we live in a thought we live in a dream, asleep to what we are doing with our mind.

All of your problems exist in your mind as thought. To stop living in your thoughts is to stop living in your problems. You would think everyone would be eager to do this, since no one thinks they want any problems.

The first Sphere on the Kabbalah Tree of Life, named Kether in Hebrew, Crown in English, represents the Divine Power of Will. One of the higher uses of this power is the application of it to direct the power of consciousness. Few people realize that they have this power, and even if they knew they had it they would probably be too lazy to employ it to direct their state of consciousness. They would rather live in their problems than do what it takes to extricate them from their problems, even though all that it takes is the deliberate direction of consciousness.

Whatever you pay attention to you receive. Pay attention to a nervous man and you find yourself feeling a bit of his nervousness. Most people don’t realize this is happening. If they even notice how nervous they are, they pay too little attention to how they cause that nervousness. They don’t even realize they are looking at a nervous man, and through the conduit of attention that man’s nervousness is travelling into them. Few people know the value of becoming more aware of what they are doing with their attention.

I had to be “initiated” into this awakening through my first wisdom teacher, Isidore Friedman. He used to say that control of the attention is the master key. “Whatever gets your attention gets you,” Iz used to say. In my early days with Iz I used to feel amazed at how aware of me he seemed to be. I could feel his state of awareness like a light, like a fire, and I reveled in it. I didn’t want to leave his side. Higher states of consciousness are “delicious” – his word.

Few people on this earth know how wonderful it is to experience a higher state of consciousness. Most of their pleasure comes from what Isidore referred to as “The bed, the belly and running around.” They also derive the set-up of temporary ego satisfaction from winning a competition. The more sensitive ones delight in the happiness glittering in their child’s eyes, or even in their pet’s eyes. They may derive the aesthetic pleasure of a beautiful sight or piece of music. But few have experienced the joy of higher consciousness. Once you taste it, that joy becomes the most valued of all joys.

Soon after I began studying with Iz I started reading all the literature I could find that fed my hunger for higher awareness. Iz recommended lots of books and I would go to Weiser’s occult bookstore in Manhattan once a month and spend all my money there. Browsing the bookshelves and finding gems was almost as much fun as devouring the books when I returned home with sacks full.

You are reading this article because it feeds you with light. In this article I’m sharing my light with you. When a teacher shares his light with one who is ready to receive it, he experiences double the light. So, thank you. If all you are getting out of this article is clever ideas or “one man’s opinions”, then your light diminishes by reading it, and I gain nothing from the exchange.

Higher consciousness is attained through will, through the application of the energy of Kether, the Crown of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, toward awakening. Awakening to what? Awakening to what you are doing with your consciousness.

Remember that I said earlier that you receive what you give your attention to. Give your attention to your present state of consciousness and you receive more consciousness. You awaken. This is a never-ending process. There is no limit to how conscious we can become, to how much illumination we can experience. In Kabbalah the ultimate states of consciousness are called Ain Soph Aur in Hebrew, Limitless Light in English.

Don’t both trying to direct your attention to the Limitless Light. All that you would be doing would be directing your attention to your thought of the light. All you get then is more absorbed in thought, where all of your problems are waiting to ambush you, to swallow you up and consume you with the heavy cares of this earth life.

Many people who consider themselves on the path of awakening, the path of enlightenment, the spiritual path are really just living their thoughts about a path. They have not escaped their problems. They may think they have, until they find that their problems are back and they begin to doubt the value or reality of the spiritual path.

What doesn’t work are your thoughts about being on the spiritual path, your thoughts about what the spiritual path entails. After Izzy used to say something that I felt was so wise that I felt the top of my head ablaze, he would say something like, “And you can take that idea and 35 cents (bus fare at the time) and get a bus ride.” He was telling me that all ideas are useless. Getting excited over an idea is like salivating over the sight of a hamburger that may tainted with salmonella.

Ideas may have value, of course. Just as the ideas you are reading here may have value, but only if they help you achieve a state of consciousness without any ideas. Now, you may think you have no thoughts, while your mind remains a’buzz with thought. It is only when you direct your attention to your mind and observe it for a while that you can tell when your mind is active with thought or absent of thought.

A mind absent of thought is a delight. It’s real freedom. Following the pattern of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, when your mind is free from thought you can focus your attention on the inner portal of real Wisdom, called Chockmah in Hebrew, represented by the second Sphere on the Tree of Life.

Thinking about wisdom, affirming that you are wise, holding the word wisdom in your mind will give you nothing but a headache if you do it long enough. Your mind has to be free of words for you to be able to apply the power of Will to focus your attention toward the inner flow of true Divine Wisdom within you to experience Wisdom. You need to deliberately open your thought-free consciousness to Divine Wisdom for its flow to enter your consciousness and guide you with its light.

The third Sphere on the Tree of Life is called Binah, meaning Understanding. It represents the inner portal of Divine Understanding, the infinite flow of insight into the true nature of reality. When you live outside of thought you can direct your attention to the inner experience of Understanding. While Wisdom guides your actions, Understanding reveals the true nature of the field of action. We can define Understanding as “Solution Consciousness”. Thought gives us nothing but problems. The more we strive to figure things out the more morassed we find ourselves in perplexing conundrums. By letting go of thought and calmly, trustingly, opening our inner feelings to the revelation of Understanding’s Light, we receive that Light. We become it.

As long as you cling to ideas you live in what Kabbalah refers to as “The Abyss”. You want to know what life is all about, but your mind will never tell you the truth. It will present you with nothing but an endless series of speculations. The truth is that you have no idea of what is going on. You have no idea of who you are or what you are. May I correct that? You have nothing but ideas as long as you live for ideas.

The great spiritual teacher Vitvan used to say that the biggest obstacle to real spiritual development is a strong intellect. Those who cling to their intellect for the egotistic thrill of superiority, or for the false security of having an intellectual roadmap, confront the biggest obstacle to receiving the guidance of true Wisdom and the illumination of true Understanding. Until you are ready to surrender your intellect you remain its victim.

When you make that surrender you cross over The Abyss into a life of Grace. The Kabbalah Tree of Life portrays The Abyss by the absence of a pathway connecting the Sphere of Understanding with the Sphere of Grace. All other Spheres on the Tree are directly connected by a pathway to the next Sphere in sequence. But not Spheres 3 and 4. We have to let go of all of our Understanding every moment. We need to enter the now brand new, without holding onto any ideas that we have gained in the past. In Zen this is called The Beginner’s Mind.

With a mind clear of any notion of anything at all we can land ourselves in the Sphere of Grace, the fourth Sphere on the Tree of Life. It is named Chessed, meaning Mercy. Here we learn how to experience everything as a given. We learn how to trust life to take care of us, to solve all of our problems for us and to overcome all of our challenges for us. If anything seems to be going wrong in your life, don’t do anything about it. Wait patiently, with a mind filled with no thought, and everything will straighten itself out quite perfectly. When you surrender thought and open your heart to the feeling of blissful inner peace that arises from trusting life, from letting go, you experience the energy of the 4th Sphere. It is uplifting. It is rapturous.

Practice letting go of control and entrusting yourself to the experience of Divine Inner Peace. Every time you go into your mind to figure something out you are falling back into The Abyss, trying to control what is already under perfect control: your life. Entrusting your life to Grace is not as passive as it may seem. It involves taking action that inspires you and fills you with joy for the fun of it, not because you are concerned about not having enough in the future.

Your mind is likely to present you with thoughts like, “If I don’t do anything everything will fall apart.” You need to let this thought go. To live in Grace you need to stop trusting your mind. Don’t go into it for truth. We can accurately state that God rules reality but the Devil rules the thinking mind. It’s all false, what that mind presents to you. It is what lies outside the gates of Eden. It is the Tree of Good and Evil that you must not eat from. Go ahead and eat from it, though, if you want to. That is what Vitvan would advise. Continue following the serpent’s temptation, the urges of the false self, until you exhaust all efforts, come up empty again and again, until you are done trusting that Judas. Then you are ready to surrender your mind to live in Grace.

The fifth Sphere is called Gevurah, which loosely means Justice or Severity. The energy of this Sphere guides us to sense true Right from Wrong. While a non-dualist perspective discusses how right and wrong are entirely made-up, on another level there is nothing more real. The more conscious you are the more obvious it becomes that there are certain things you simply cannot do without suffering more severe repercussions than you are wont to. Rather than going into some ineffectual intellectualism and metaphysical metafizzling, as Isidore used to call it, drop thought, go into your feelings, and you will be able to clearly sense when someone, including you, are setting into motion forces that are going to come back to destroy the evil doer. Jesus said that The Way is narrow. Bob Dylan said, “Beauty walks a razor’s edge, some day I’ll make it mine.” Both of these statements point to the inner guidance that you can receive if you direct your consciousness to the inner portal through which the energy and light of Justice flows within you, to guide you.

The sixth Sphere is named Tiphareth, which translates to mean Beauty. When we combine our awareness of Grace and Justice, the inner “voice” of unspeakable Beauty is the result. Beauty is what every great artist tunes into for magnificent creation. Beauty is what God tunes into for the creation of the beautiful work of art that is the universe. It is deeply intoxicating and addictive. It is what drives writers and other artists to work at their art endlessly, making any sacrifices, to touch and to express and to share the energy of Beauty.

Visibly Beautiful human forms attract us on the sexual level. When you see someone stunningly Beautiful, you are floored. But all that is really happening is that the visual image of that person has triggered the energy flow of Beautiful feeling within you. As long as you identify with the outer image, you feel lost. You empty yourself of beauty. Focus your consciousness on the inner portal of Beauty within you and cleave fast unto that. To get lost in the outer world is to lose your power, your presence, your life. It is to chase after mirages until you are spent in the ashes of utter defeat.

The seventh Sphere on the Tree is named Netzach, meaning Victory. True Victory is an internal experience of consciousness. It is a feeling of everything working out right. We achieve this feeling through surrender to Grace. On the Tree of Life, the fourth Sphere, the Sphere of Grace, sits directly above the seventh. In Kabbalah we are told that the higher rules the lower. Thus, true Victory is the fruit of Grace. You cannot make yourself win. Victory comes from the Gods, the ancient Greeks taught. Victory comes from trusting that everything is going to work out just right for you, so you don’t have to meddle with it. Trust, let go, and then trust somemore and your experience of Victory in any situation is assured.

The eighth Sphere on the Tree is named Hod, meaning Honor or Glory. The ancient Greeks taught also that a good reputation is a gift of the Gods, and that it is up to the Gods to create around us a kind of fence of protection that will cause any would-be enemies to be too terrified to take action against us. In other words, those would-be enemies are governed by their own undeniable sense of Justice as they draw near to doing anything malicious toward us. You don’t achieve Glory, Honor, or a great and powerful reputation, through personal effort, but by surrender to Grace. If there is someone speaking against you behind your back, don’t seek vengeance nor give it any thought. Justice, called Dilke in Greek, inevitably comes upon anyone with the Hubris to do anything wrong or unjust. It will hunt them down, sooner or later. There isno escaping it. It would be unjust of you to do the work of Dike. That would mean you are taking matters into your own hands, which can only produce more problems for you. Remember, life is handling everything perfectly for you. Your job is to get out of the way.

The ninth Sphere on the Tree is named Yesod, which means Foundation. It represents the ever-present Foundation of perfect support that you can always rely upon. It represents the aspect of life that Wisdom counts on. Count on life to work everything out for you. It is a myth. For instance, that you have to earn a living. Prosperity also comes from the Gods, the ancient Greeks taught. As long as you do not pursue an unjust, unfair course of action aimed at taking advantage of another, while surrendering control over your life to the Divine, to Grace, your wealth is assured: you are bound to have more than enough of all you require for a rich, happy, gloriously beautiful, balanced victorious life.

You can’t figure any of this out though, not with your thinking mind. I recently spoke with someone who said that she is not willing to let go of her mind until she fully comprehends how that is helpful. Can you see that she was not ready to take the leap from the third Sphere to the fourth? She was still relying upon her thinking mind, rather than on life itself, on Grace. This is like building castles in the air. You know what happens to those castles.

The tenth and final Sphere on the Tree is named Malkuth, which means Kingdom. A kingdom is ruled by a king. To the degree that you rule over your consciousness you are the king of the kingdom of your experience. What most people think is going on in their physical world is actually going on in their thoughts. They are, what Izzy used describe as, living in their heads. They think and don’t know they think. They identify you with their thoughts of you, their circumstances with their thoughts of their circumstances, themselves with their thoughts of themselves, their God with their thought of God. They don’t realize that they are not really living in the physical world. They live in their thoughts of the physical world. There is no king ruling their kingdom. They live in chaos, in The Abyss of Darkness, in a sea of illusion.

As you surrender thought you enter the conscious experience of what is. You can then focus on how you feel in the present moment. Instead of trying to control your outer world, you then direct your state of consciousness, your inner world. Instead of changing anything or anyone outside of you, you work on freeing your state of consciousness from inner discord. You open your consciousness to the portal of Grace and rely upon that and then you see all of your material conditions in life working out perfectly.

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